Jon C. Swanson's Blog, page 27

A prayer for the first Sunday of Advent

A prayer for when the Advent candles are lit in the middle of the morning.

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God, we light candles when it is light,
knowing that when it is dark,
the light that is little now
will be large then.

We speak your words of promise when it is light,
knowing that when it is dark,
the promises that are easy to say now,
will be anchors to hold onto.

Amen.

Withness

I’m teaching a class about pastoral care right now. Here’s part of what I wrote to a student the other day. It’s a helpful thought for the Friday before Advent.

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You are inviting me to think about presence. Part of why presence is so significant in my thinking and in our lives may be shown in the fact that in order to help, Jesus put on a body and lived with humans. His work wasn’t an outside intervention. He walked with, lived with, talked with, wept with, ate with, debated with, i...

On kings and thanksgiving.

Another thing about being part of the kingdom of Jesus is that if he is the creator and the generous leader of the kingdom, if he is the king of kings, then our power and our gifts and our aptitudes and our relationships and our opportunities are made possible more by his graciousness than by our hard work.

And so we can learn to be grateful instead of working so hard to be impressive.

If Jesus is forever, then the questions we have and the worries that overtake us and the questions we ...

Adoption

Rich Dixon invites us to think about welcome:

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One of our FREEDOM TOUR 2016 teammates spoke about Adoption.

Moïse (Mo-ḗes, which means “Moses”) was an amazing cyclist, and he’s married to my cousin, Rachel. In preparation, he invited us to read these verses.

For those who are led by the Spirit of God   are the children of God. The Spirit   you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again;   rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship.  ...

More on the actual king.

Picking up from yesterday:

We read on Sunday that Jesus is the king of kings.

When the beings who are in power get together, Jesus is the one who has the most power. Jesus is the ultimate authority.

Though he tells Pilate that his kingdom is not of this world, that doesn’t mean that his kingdom doesn’t have anything to do with this world.

He wasn’t saying, “you are in charge of the National Football League and I’m in charge of the FIFA. Separate and equally important sports.”

H...

The actual King.

Yesterday was the last Sunday of the church year. Next week is the first Sunday of Advent. Next Sunday, the church calendar starts the process of preparing for Christmas, of helping us cut through the chaos of the holidays that we dread and find the kind of anticipation for the coming of Jesus that we can look forward to.

Because the advent season is about the coming of Jesus the first time and the second time, a few decades ago we began calling this Christ the King Sunday. It’s a day to ...

A prayer for Christ the King.

King Jesus.

We aren’t used to calling you that.

We’ve got other names for you,
usually nice, usually kind, usually respectful.

But we’re more likely to think of you as the one who saves us than as the one who can tell us what to do.

We’re more likely to know your friendship than your authority.

We confess that we want to keep authority ourselves,
to tell rather than be told, to command rather than to confess.

Forgive us for missing your power over all when we focus on your neg...

Disheartened, Encourage the.

Sometimes, when I pray next to a hospital bed, I start laughing. Usually, inside my head. Sometimes it creeps into my voice, though, when I know that the other people in the room understand.

Because I often say something like, “God, I ask that you will strengthen her heart and give peace to her mind while she waits.” And even as I say it, I know that the test results everyone is waiting for are neurological or the problem that everyone is watching for the next 24-48 hours is cardiac.

A...

Honest worship.

“Half-hearted praise is no praise at all.” That’s what the worship leader said. He was trying to get us to sing louder, I think, or more enthusiastically. He wanted us to be whole-hearted, all in. “Come on, church.”

I’ve stood where he stands. I may even have offered that call. But I can’t anymore.

It may be a true statement, when talking to an individual, with an awareness of a pattern of half-hearted commitment. The young man who approached Jesus wanting to know how to inherit eternal...

Butterflies

Rich Dixon has another tough question.

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FREEDOM TOUR 2016 – turns out, when you invite people to get real, sometimes it happens.

The topic was Freedom. We read a story of healing including this line:

Then he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.”

We talked about wounds, mostly the deeper, often more painful, hidden ones. We talked a bit about physical healing, about why people like Rich don’t get healed.

But this wasn’t about that.

We talked a...